The allure of the east (Coast of Malaysia)

Abstract

Every year, from 1955 until the late 1960s, the photographers from the Photographic Society of Singapore would make annual pilgrimages to the towns on the East Coast of Malaysia, to take images of its ‘picturesque inhabitants’. As a result, hundreds of prints of Malay women, children and fishermen in kampong villages and on the beach circulated widely in exhibitions locally as well as internationally, all depicting the East Coast as a rural and bucolic destination. The photographers were largely male and Chinese. In this essay, I present close readings of selected photographs and the language used to describe the visits to discuss a racial and gendered gaze on a community in Malaysia. I argue that while the perception of the Malays as rural and simple folk might have begun as a hangover from colonial stereotyping, subsequent photographic representation manifested different desires. Rather than control and containment, the images made by the Singaporean photographers reflected a nostalgia for kampong life amidst the anxiety of rapid modernisation and the shifting roles of women in society. The influence of photographic pictorialism, with its emphasis on highly stylised photographs, further promoted the production of simplistic, emblematic images.